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Evil Forces

March 15, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I am using a screenshot completely unrelated to anything that I am going to talk about just because I thought it looked cool. Last night was that night we dread all year long… the night we attempt to deal with Taxes. Tax Season is sort of the boogie man for adults, with the IRS being the grim harbingers of our impending doom. The truth is we have never really run into major issues with Taxes, and in spite of this… I still get almost physically ill when I think about dealing with them. We have our taxes done, because there is something about having the piece of mind that someone is obligated by contract to come defend you if you ever get audited… and at least somewhat financially responsible if something bad comes up. I realize in the internet age I should be able to deal with my own taxes rather easily… but it is just more comforting to hurl a stack of papers at someone else… flail my arms and expect them to make it all make sense. Over the years we have gotten mildly better at getting our shit together, and have started a system that involves cramming everything that looks even vaguely tax related into a manila envelope. For the most part this year… we were able to pull things together easy enough with only minimal last minute scramble to try and sort out the last few documents that we were missing. The truth… the fact that we did this pulling together act on a day other than the day we had our tax appointment… is a huge positive for us. Traditionally right up until the very moment we are supposed to go we are flying through the house rooting through piles of paperwork looking for a golden ticket… or in our case that receipt from some charitable giving.

The thing that always screws us over in the end, is the fact that we functionally have to pay taxes in two different states. During the summer my wife works as an AP test grader… which always occurs in another state and counts as income for said state. So that means in the next few weeks we are going to have to do the whole money order/certified check thing… and get the stupid slip of paper mailed off to this other state and hope beyond hope that it gets there. We are fine in the long run, having to pay both states as is usually the case and getting back some from federal so it works out in the end. But I cannot explain how fundamental and deep to my very core this sense of panic is that I feel when we start discussing taxes. I am wondering if this is just a me thing, or if literally everyone goes through this yearly hell. Its like so rarely do you really actually have to confront a cold force that can literally ruin you… in quite the same fashion as the IRS could. All of it seems to be buried in arcane formula, and calculations that only software actually understands… that feels like it could very well add up and say that you owe everything you have. There are certain aspects of life that make complete and total sense to me… but the Tax code will never be one of them. So instead we live in this state of augmented anxiety until finally we gather the courage… or it gets late enough that we absolutely have to deal with them.

Then when they are over… there is this crashing wave of euphoria. Like we just survived the fight of our lives and came out with most of our limbs intact. So instead of heading home we went out to eat, to celebrate our victory. Its like going home didn’t make sense after the epic battle we just survived. So instead we went to one of our regular rotation of Mexican restaurants where I had a glorious feast of chicken, cheese and chorizo. I am supremely disappointed in whoever coded the spell checker built into Windows because I am seeing a red squiggly line over chorizo… the most glorious of meats. After dinner we wound up needing to make a quick trip to Walmart… which for us is a once in a month occurrence because our local store is completely crazy. After wandering around and looking for what we actually came for, we exited thirty to forty minutes later. So by the time I fed the animals and changed into my comfy flannel pants… I wound up getting home about an hour late for the Final Fantasy XIV raid night. I had talked during the day about wanting to make an attempt on Diadem and they did in fact seem to be able to pull together the people for that. Some folks even got some of the tasty 265 gear…. but not for the classes they were actually playing. Final Fantasy XIV really needs to give us the ability to trade gear among a fixed party. I wound up tagging in after Diadem for Thordan Extreme, of which we sort of figured out at least the first few phases of that dance. It is going to be one of those fights where we simply have to memorize the pattern and make sure everyone makes it through each phase shift alive. More than anything though… I am happy to have slain the tax beast at least for this one season.

Book Challenge #95: The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

March 3, 2017 by Grace

Once again it is my reading challenge list time. This time we’re discussing #95, The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. The first volume, Red Mars, was published in 1993. The subsequent two novels, Green Mars and Blue Mars were published in 1994 and 1996 respectively. This time we get two firsts for my book challenge. This is the first time I’m revisiting a book I’ve already read, and the first time I enjoyed a series entry enough to read more than the first book. I had read Red Mars a few years ago and remembered liking it, but I never read the other two. This time around I decided to give them a shot, which is why there’s been so much time since my last book post!

Since this is a series I wanted to comment on the books independently before I give my final verdict, so let’s walk through each book.

Red Mars: This is the story of the colonization of Mars. The novel actually starts off in the middle of the story with a point of crisis, then goes back to show the journey of the “first 100” colonists from their voyage from Earth through several decades of life on Mars. This is definitely a hard science fiction novel, and if you don’t recognize words like thermokarst or polyna you might be spending some quality time with a dictionary as you read. However, this novel also looks at the social interactions between the first 100 and the larger political landscape with just as much interest and detail, and that’s why the book is so engaging to me.

We get to see the landscape of this alien world, and how human activity changes it for better or worse. Some characters want to preserve Mars as much as possible, others want to terraform it completely, with various factions at different positions between these extremes. All of these intentions also get clouded by normal human things, romantic entanglements, pettiness, greed, and jealousy. In the end Mars becomes a very different place, and most of the original 100 colonists have died, but you are still left on an optimistic note because there are some groups still standing and there is still work to be done.

I remembered enjoying this book a lot when I first read it, and I enjoyed it again this time so I decided to keep reading the next in the series. Considered on its own I’d be tempted to give this one a rating of 4.5 or even 5 out of 5.

Green Mars: This one picks up a bit after Red Mars left off, starting with the hidden colony under the polar ice cap. At this point at least 2 generations have been born on Mars, and initially it seemed like the story was going to follow mainly their stories but in fact like the first book it bounces around between lots of characters. The points of view include the grandchildren of the original 100, new immigrants from Earth, and several of the first 100 who are still around.

Like the first book, there’s a lot of the science of Mars here, along with other disciplines like economics and sociology. I’ve got a firm grounding in a lot of the science so I was fascinated by it, but if for example you don’t know or care why the percentage of nitrogen in the atmosphere is important then there will probably be big chunks of this book that don’t appeal.

The story here isn’t too different from the later half of Red Mars. There’s fascinating worldbuilding (both in the literary sense and the actual terraforming of Mars sense), but it is also extremely slow paced. I’m invested in the surviving members of the first 100 but it is strange seeing them live to unnatural ages, still driving the destiny of Mars when they should be part of its history. By the time I finished I was satisfied with the story but also unsure whether I wanted to invest the time reading the last book in the series. Taken on its own I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as Red Mars, more like a 3.5 out of 5 rating.

Blue Mars: This book is even more of the same. There’s a lot of long descriptions of martian scenery punctuated by the politics of Mars and the little vignettes that make up the long lives of the novel’s characters. There were a couple of moments in this one that fell flat for various reasons ranging from changes in the characters to lack of obvious narrative direction. The one that broke my suspension of disbelief the most was seeing Sax, the quintessential scientist, be amazed at the existence of a woman math genius. It felt weirdly inconsistent not just with my hope for progress, but with the novel itself, a world hundreds of years in the future where we’ve colonized Mars, where people of different genders and races seem to share life and work and politics and everything else fairly equally.

The few times where I got jolted out of the story in this book also made me think hard about what the narrative was about, and whose story it really is. There’s not much of a coherent journey in Blue Mars for any one character. Instead I suppose this book and the series as a whole are really the story of Mars itself as it gets infected with life and evolves over a few hundred years, or perhaps the story of humanity as it leaves the Earth behind. Taken on its own this was my least favorite of the three books. I would rate it 3/5.

TL;DR: Red Mars is pretty great and I’d recommend it. The other two books in the series have some interesting ideas but get bogged down by slow pacing and lots of descriptive text.

The Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson

Rating: 4/5 stars

Verdict: Thought-provoking hard sci-fi about colonizing another planet, and about social and political power. It is a very long, slow read but full of interesting ideas that make the journey worth it. Would especially recommend the first book of the trilogy.

Next up: The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov.

Garula Is Mad

March 3, 2017 by Belghast

Tonight I am sitting down to knock out a blog post because in the morning I will be interrupting my routine. Tomorrow night my wife and I will be going to see the a stage production of the Wizard of Oz and it is going to simply be much handier to have a single vehicle. However this also means that I have to get up and out the door considerably earlier than I normally would. On an average day I leave the house around 7 and tomorrow that deadline is getting pushed up before 6:30. There is no way I can get showered and ready and write a blog post all within that time frame so you are getting something tonight. I was a bit all of the place putting time in Final Fantasy XIV, Horizon Zero Dawn and Final Fantasy XV. All of them were enjoyable in their own way but much like last night… I was never fully committed to any of them. I think I am trying to come down with something, because I have just felt drained and hollow at the end of the day.

The highlight of the night however was hanging out on Spiral/Weiward’s Twitch channel as she played Final Fantasy V. The entire AggroChat crew has a very specific relationship with Final Fantasy V. The game I believe is among Ash’s favorites in the series, and as a result we get roped into participating in the Four Job Fiesta every year. I’ve talked about the charity event numerous times, but the roots are that you play Final Fantasy V with only a randomly chosen set of jobs. The truth is I have never actually played Final Fantasy V legitimately, having only beaten it while doing the Fiesta. That said it was super interesting to watch Spiral struggle with some of the same things we have all struggled with in confronting this game. The best part of the night however is when she started having the same realizations that a lot of us have… about the deep connections between a lot of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavenward content and characters and settings from V. You can be absolutely certain that when the Fiesta time comes around again, we will be pestering Spiral to join in the fun.

Many Games! Handle It!

March 2, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of an odd one, in that I did not get out of work until after 6 pm and did not get home until almost 7 pm. The series of meetings that I have been thrust into on Wednesday nights has been a thing, and there seems to be no end to them in the near future. By the time I finally got home I was feeling fairly lousy, and after fixing dinner for wife and I didn’t really feel like doing much. I sort of melted into the couch and attempted to do a little gaming on the laptop, but before I realized it I was falling asleep. My wife seemed to be going through the same thing and by the time I headed to bed around 8 pm she was completely dead to the world on the couch and unwakeable without going through an excessive amount of effort. So I left her sleeping there and crashed… only to wake up just shy of 1 am due to the cats getting into a bit of a tussle. I stumbled into the kitchen to take some meds because I was still feeling generally lousy, and around that point in my sleepy fumbling I dropped a pill blister on the floor that miraculously roused sleeping beauty. So we attempted to head to bed while not waking up enough to make falling right back to sleep a chore. Thankfully after about thirty minutes of “adjusting” I got right back to sleep and was not woken again until my watch “pre-alarm” started going off. Generally speaking my smart watch makes me up by buzzing taps about a minute ahead of our insanely annoying alarm on the other side of the room… giving me a bit of a gentle rousing before the crash of reality hits with the elder machination.

The challenge I am struggling with right now is there are just too damned many games I want to play. For starters thanks to a whole slew of reasons I have yet to be Final Fantasy XV. As I said the other day I am between two decisions on this game… do I force myself to push ahead and play the game in a manner that I do not feel enjoyable, or do I keep piddling away at it in my own manner and make the most of it? So far I am leaning towards option two, and I am still very much enjoying this game. Were this my ONLY game I probably would be considerably further in it, because in every manner it feels like a single player MMO to me, and I am sort of piddling around in it like I do an MMO.

Then there is of course Horizon Zero Dawn, the new hotness that I want to spend all my time playing. I wrote at length about my feelings regarding this game and it bummed me out that I didn’t feel okay with hanging out upstairs and playing it last night. I felt largely out of sorts and the game does in fact require a modicum of coordination to land shots in the appropriate sweet spots. As a result I opted against playing, but I still have a super strong drive to do so… and am hoping I will be feeling generally grand this evening and can return to exploring the much more opened world.

Then there is of course Zelda Breath of the Wild which should be arriving for my Wii U next Tuesday. I am not really sure why the delay but in truth I am a bit thankful for it. I’ve opted against getting a Switch on launch day, because really there is just this one title that I would want to play on it. In theory I will be happy enough playing it on the Wii U because all I really want to do is explore the world and get my Zelda on once again. That said the major problem is… it is once again another big game stacked on top of a pile of already big games.

Another big game that is now sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be installed is Torment Tides of Numenera. The funny thing about Kickstarter games is that when they finally release… they sort of sneak up on you. I just looked it up in gmail, and my original backing of this game was on March 6th of 2013, and almost four years later it finally shows up. The problem with Torment however is that it is also waiting in line behind another similar title… Tyranny which I also have yet to finish. Spoiler alert, Tyranny will be the March AggroChat game club title, so one way or another I will be finishing that one off in the coming weeks. However I really only want to have one classic PC RPG sitting waiting in the wings at a time, so for the moment Torment will sit there waiting.

Then there is of course the next Mass Effect game which releases somewhere towards the end of March. I am hoping and praying that this will not be another Dragon Age Inquisition, where it is a Bioware experience that I just could not get into for whatever reason. Generally speaking I like the Mass Effect series way better than I do Dragon Age, because overall the games have been a much more even handed experience for me. My favorite in the series is Mass Effect 2, but I still find it super easy to get enjoyment out of both the original and the third installment. I’ve played through the entire sequence several times as well, and they still have lots of great replayability for me personally. I am hoping that Andromeda just adds to that experience, but once again it is a HUGE game… landing at almost exactly the same time as everything else.

Then in the summer we have Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind… which lands June 6th and looks awesome. The only problem there however is that I know the experience is going to get overshadowed by the launch of another MMO expansion. However this post is more a placeholder saying that I would absolutely LOVE to wrap up the other content, or at least make a dent in it before Morrowind officially lands.

Finally we have Stormblood… the Final Fantasy XIV expansion that is certain to overshadow literally anything else that is going on at that time. It launches June 20th and is going to ultimately spawn a feeding frenzy of leveling through both the new story and content and beginning all of the things that come with a proper expansion. Essentially this is also a line in the sand… that I basically need to have completed any of the games that I mentioned above before we reach this point in the year or I am simply not going to get around to it for several months. I am certain that I have left some things off of the list, but it seems like there are just an awful lot of big gaming experiences landing next to each other that I really want to play. What I mean by “big gaming” is that each of these is a massive game featuring more gameplay that a person could reasonably sit through in a day or two. With a shooter for example, you have a linear story arc that follows a sequence of levels until you finally reach the crescendo in the final boss fight. Each of the games on my list however is an RPG with meandering and character progression… all of which for me at least can take hundreds of hours of gameplay rather than tens of hours. For the moment however… I am going to keep juggling FFXV and Horizon and see where I can make it progress wise. However I still feel like I am drowning in too many good games to play at once and the fear of missing out… is tangible.